


the after

by sleepcities



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types, Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Gen, also spoilers for the raven boys and the raven king, hi i read the raven cycle this week while procrastinating final projects :~) i am so sad, let's see if this gets a second chapter, spoilers for the burning maze!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-08
Updated: 2019-12-08
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:01:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 979
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21712678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sleepcities/pseuds/sleepcities
Summary: Time doesn't matter much when you've already run out of it.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 13





	the after

Noah Czerny could still remember being Noah Czerny. He remembered the part after, too. The tricky part, really, was figuring out which was which, putting the events in order according to the rules of time that he’d lived by, when he’d, you know, _lived_.

Time doesn’t matter much when you’ve already run out of it.

Here, it seemed infinite, seemed to stretch in all directions, an endless line with an endless wait that he’d been participating in forever and would be forever more. How long had he been here? No idea. How long would he be here? Not a clue. E-Z Death was moving along at a slightly more inviting pace, but it just sent everyone to the Fields of Asphodel, and Noah was pretty sure he was an optimist. He wanted to take his chances. He couldn’t wander the hills of Henrietta, Virginia, anymore, couldn’t spend days singing murder squash songs with Ronan or exchanging exasperated looks with Adam or holding hands with Blue or following (watching over) Gansey, and that was depressing, but not as depressing as the thought of wandering a lonely field forever, having lost them all.

He’d seen the way those kids lived, after all. Even if they didn’t die as heroes, they were living as such. They’d make it to Elysium. He was sure of it, and he wanted to join them, but he wasn’t so sure about himself, he was realizing. That was why the E-Z Death line was so increasingly appealing.

Noah Czerny hadn’t lived a particularly heroic life. He’d just done what he pleased, driven fast cars and pushed wild ideas and followed friends that didn’t care about his cars or his ideas or him in general, really. And then he’d died. Been killed. Being murdered by your best friend in the woods didn’t feel particularly heroic, either, especially when you were being murdered as a sacrifice because your best friend that didn’t care about your cars or your ideas or you in general, really, wanted to be rich again.

Getting hit in the face with a skateboard and twitching on the ground as it—he—continued to bludgeon you to death did not feel particularly heroic.

He could only hope that his actions afterward were enough, that his eleven-minute demise and his sacrifice of himself twice more were enough to land him somewhere that would allow him to see his friends again, the ones that really cared, even if they wouldn’t remember him until they, too, were the _after_ , even though he hoped they wouldn’t have to be the after until decades from whatever _now_ was.

Time doesn’t matter when you’ve already run out of it.

He could wait.

-

Nico di Angelo remembered most of being Nico di Angelo, but bits and pieces of his memory were lost forever to the River Lethe. Time did not follow him in a way that made sense, either, but for different reasons: magic hotels that ate seventy years of you and spit you out in a new century, shadows that let you jump across the Atlantic in a matter of minutes. He wished that time would stop functioning linearly now, stop trudging forward, let him go back to the day he’d let Lester Papadopoulos—no, _Apollo_ ; they were the same, even if Lester was a manifestation of Apollo’s weaknesses with very little of his strength—leave Camp Half-Blood without him.

Time doesn't matter much when you’ve already missed your chance.

Luckily for Nico, he dealt with death on a regular basis. It wasn’t as edgy as it sounded. He wasn’t killing anyone, and, unlike Noah, he had never been killed. But the world of the dead was his birthright. He had a bed in the palace of the King of the Underworld—and that was no metaphor, because the King of the Underworld was his father. He wished that meant he could break the rules of death, of permanence, of loss. He’d learned before that he couldn’t. Nico didn’t think of himself as an optimist, but perhaps he was one, after all, because here he was, willing to try.

It wasn’t that he thought he could bring Jason back. When he’d done that with Hazel, the Doors of Death had been open already. But gods, what was he supposed to do? If Jason was in the Underworld (and he _should_ be, _had to_ be, because they’d buried him properly at Camp Jupiter, which he knew because Reyna wasn’t stupid), why couldn’t Nico see him again?

It wasn’t his best idea. Millions of souls in the Underworld, in transport or being processed or in transport again or in their final destinations, and Nico wanted to find _one_ . Last time he’d set out on such a quest, he’d ended up missing Bianca by a matter of days, or maybe it was hours, maybe even minutes. Either way, she’d decided to aim for rebirth _just_ before Nico found out where she’d been staying in Elysium. Maybe Jason had already decided. But Nico couldn’t know for sure unless he went looking, and he _had_ to know.

Maybe it wasn’t so much that he had to know as it was that he had to see Jason, but only one of those things was definitely possible.

He didn’t want to think about that, though, really. He didn’t like the concept of ‘seeing Jason’ being an impossible feat. Jason had been the first person to go to such lengths to prove to Nico that he was a friend. He’d supported him and missed him and _trusted_ him, trusted him so loudly that Nico couldn’t tune him out, just because he thought Nico might need it. He deserved better than a gaping hole in his chest and a late burial. Nico had to know that he was okay.

Time matters when this could be your last chance. 

He walked faster.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading this dramatic ass monster!
> 
> there's something about the world of trc (or rather the way it interacts with mythology & magic) that made me want to believe it exists inside the same universe as riordan's works, so we ended up here. honestly i like the idea of jason and nico in particular interacting with the gangsey (i think jason and gansey specifically would get along really well) so much that i might toss out another fic, but as of right now i'm, like, sad, dude.


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